Benedict wrote:With all due respect, SAs enhance the problem the way they are. An unskilled character with SA5 and Atr5 is equal to a character with Atr5 Skill5 and no applicable SA.
They enhance the problem. They
aren't the problem. Several components of the problem exist with or without them and thus must be dealt with independently of them. Thus, it's an issue to deal with separately if such an issue still exists when we are done.
Benedict wrote:There are two reasons the way I see it that happens. The first is that Trained vs Untrained is not covered correctly in the first place. That's why I suggested earlier that Untrained skill use should give you a +2Ob penalty.
CharA has AG3 Larceny3 and wants to pick a good (Ob4) lock? 6d10 vs Ob4. Success 34%.
CharB has AG6, nil Larceny, and wants to do the same thing? 6d10 vs Ob6. Success 1%.
The 1-5 range doesn't provide enough mechanical weight because Skills work the way they do. With my combined suggestions regarding SAs, Tool effect, Expertise effect, and raising caps from 1-5 to 1-6 for top priority pickers that problem in my mind disappears. Bear in mind that the tweaks I suggested earlier are not to be seen as multiple choices. These are tweaks meant to work together.
Does that solution really makes things more complicated?
This thread has gotten too long, and I've been multitasking too much to keep track of everyone's separate suggestions. You'd have to lay the entire thing out in one place for me to actually see how the thing worked. Immediately, though, I have to point out:
1. You're still not addressing the "one point of an attribute is worth a point of a skill" problem, which makes attributes better in general because they apply to more stuff.
2. Whether you're giving dice for tools or dis/advantage for tools, that doesn't change the core issue of skills.
3. Nothing we do about untrained skill checks helps the core problem. It simply means my optimal build becomes "max stat, 1 point in as many skills as possible."
4. Top priority pick is already 6 ranks in skills or attributes.
Benedict wrote:Now, that. That kills entirely the "player characters are turned loose fully-powered at character creation" statement earlier. Almost every game I know out there is about creating a character and advance him through play. The "play what you want from the start" concept in my eyes is a stroke of genius that sets you guys apart from every other game out there.
These points addressed, throwing away the X+Y concept is just a mortal blow to the "Strategic play and clever decisions trump high scores and big weapons". Just see at the Floating City campaign how I goaded the main antagonist in a duel that was in my favor when they had us cornered and outnumbered.
I feel like this is an unfair exaggeration. Unless you're trying to tell me that your character concept was the mechanical goal "The maximum thing mechanically possible," then this doesn't change anything -- let alone deal a "mortal blow." The statistics your character has (skills, proficiencies, whatever) only matter in what those numbers mean relative to the fiction and how they compare against the rest of the world. If your average NPC has 3s and 4s in their stats and you can have 6s and 7s in the stuff you want to do, it doesn't matter whether the max is 7 or 20.
If anything, I'd say the
current setup is a bigger deterrent to "play the character you want." My concept is a master thief. I max out stealth and larceny. The problem? My five dots isn't enough in that skill to reliably and consistently beat someone who has 3 dots Trade: Guard (or, worse -- 4 dots, if they were good, professional guards rather than your average town watch) 6 or 7 dice vs 8, if we assume equal attributes. If I want to actually put statistics consistantly in my favor, I now have to go max out some attributes as well to make sure I have enough dice.
On the other hand, the current proposal puts a great amount of distance between you and said guard's skill pools. He's probably got a 4 and you could start at 7 or 8, to a maximum of 10 if you went with a tier-5 priority.
EinBein wrote:This is where I don't agree. Though attributes and skills are picked during character creation, they get different value from the amount of points you get from a specific priority.
It doesn't matter how many points you get from a given priority. At the end of the day Agility 5 Stealth 3 is both mechanically indistinguishable from Agility 3 and Stealth 5 and
objectively better than Agility 3, Stealth 5. For the aforementioned thief, Agility will be the dominant attribute for at least 4 of those six skills. Any point put in agility is going to be 4x as valuable as one point in any given skill plus any untrained skill I have, plus one point in every proficiency in the game because it's the part of the base combat pool.
Even if you lower the number of attribute points you can spend overall, you're still going to be better off investing in more attributes than less at character creation. The best one could do to adjust from the priority table is make it so the steps between levels of priority were less beneficial for attributes than anything else (say, 2.3 for level 1 but only 3 for tier 5) but that has the opposite problem. If tier 3 is only barely worth more than tier 2 in attributes, why bother investing that point? Meanwhile, after character creation, my best move is still to raise agility and cunning rather than improve anything else because attributes are still more valuable than anything else.
Various people suggesting caps wrote:suggestion for caps based on ranks or whatever
Can't say I'm a fan. It seems to defeat the point of having SAs, Help, and so forth if we're putting artificial caps on what can be achieved. They are also annoying to remember and seem like ..well. Less fun.
"Ob 2 --- Oh wow! what a great roll! You rolled six successes! -- wait. What's your skill? Nevermind then. MoS1."
Adding another level of checking and comparison is a drag and feels a bit like you're having your roll taken away.
What we need is an overhaul that addresses the underlying issues, rather than a series of patches to correct what's broken with them.
DannyBoy wrote:My idea is this:
1. Keep attributes at 1-5 scale with 6 being exceptional
2. Increase skills to a 1-10 scale
3. Increase the number of skill points at chargen
4. Keep X+Y
I really feel that a lot of us are making this whole issue a lot more complicated than it needs to be, what with all the check bonuses, fractions, and only counting successes up to the attribute value.
This came up a few pages ago and ran into the problem where you now have two separate scales of difficulty to juggle, as your average attribute roll has 5-6 dice and your average skill would have 8-9, if we assume the same scales.
DannyBoy wrote:Also, while I'm not wholly averse to changing the die type to a d6, I will say that it does change how base TN shifts work in too drastic a way. A level 3 wound is supposed to begin the death spiral by boosting TNs to 8. TN 7 was fluffed as a wound that could be fought through, and with the 'grin and bear it' SA ability it can be easily worked around, which it's supposed to be.
By comparison:
D10 - Chance per die wrote:
Wound Level 0-1 TN6= 50% chance
Wound Level 2 TN7=40%
Wound Level 3 TN8=30%
Wound Level 4 TN9=20%
Wound Level 5 TN10=10%
D6 - Chance per die wrote:
Wound Level 0-1 TN4= 50% chance
Wound Level 2 TN4=50%
Wound Level 3 TN5=33%
Wound Level 4 TN5=33%
Wound Level 5 TN6=16%
At wound level 3, there's only a 3% difference, and it's more forgiving overall. Given how ridiculously brutal our game's death spiral can be, I think that's a good thing. One must keep in mind that to get a level 3 or 4 wound, you're also generally suffering massive impact in addition to the TN hike.
DannyBoy wrote:Also, with d6s, are we doing away with exploding dice?
By default, yes. They originally existed so that no ob could be too high to have some kind of chance at beating, but in practice, it made things way more swingy than we would have liked. As it stands, there will be enough ways to get bonus dice before the roll that you shouldn't need the explosions afterward.
CURRENT PROPOSALS.
For reasons outlined above, the best variant proposal I've seen in terms of fixing the problem without patching over it or complicating it was the X+Y on a 1-7 scale.. but as pointed out it has a ton of problems and doesn't resolve the underlying issue.
Here are the two versions Higgins and I are currently leaning towards.
Proposal 1 wrote:- Attributes and skills work on a 1-8 scale, with 9-10 being T5 territory like the 6th dot is now.
- The core attributes: Agility, Brawn, Cunning, Will, and Perception.
- Three derived attributes: Trauma (the average of brawn and will), Reflex (the average of agility and cunning), and Body (1/3 Brawn)
- Skills and attributes are rolled independently.
- Skills are tied to an attribute, but only to determine their starting value when first purchased (1/3 of the governing attribute, rounding down).
- Untrained skills can use whichever attribute is appropriate at the time at its full die pool, but all dice rolled work at max TN.
Proposal 2 wrote:
- Attributes and skills work on a 1-8 scale, with 9-10 being T5 territory like the 6th dot is now.
- The core attributes: Agility, Brawn, Cunning, Will, and Perception.
- Three derived attributes: Trauma (the average of brawn and will), Reflex (the average of agility and cunning), and Body (1/3 Brawn)
- Skills and attributes are rolled independently and are in no way directly tied, at character creation or otherwise.
- The Associated Skills mechanic is expanded. Instead of giving a flat +1 die, it gives the value of the thing you're adding in /3. Which makes it useless for 0-2, +1 for 3-5, +2 for 6-8, +3 for 9-10.
- The effect is no longer just limited to skills. Where before you might go "I'm going to throw a bunch of lawyer-speak at this guy to convince him I'm right -- I'd like to add a die from my Trade: Lawyer to this manipulation check" you can now do that with everything. Bring in your Strength on an Athletics check, Bring Will to a Command roll to challenge someone's authority, bring a bonus from Engineering into your Strength check to apply better leverage, etc.
- Untrained skills can use whichever attribute is appropriate at the time at its full die pool, but all dice rolled work at max TN.
Scale for either proposal wrote:The scale, again, using Brawn as an illustration:
1. Small animals.
2. Children, the disabled.
3. Sedentary office workers
4. Average, active people. Farmers, laborers
5-6. Professional athletes.
7-8 Professional Strongman types. The height of what normal people can actually achieve.
9-10. Genetic freaks. Tier 5 material. Andrey the Giant. Hafthor Bjornson.
Proposal 1 is the quickest, cleanest, and most consistent. I'd argue that it was the better designed for play.
Proposal 2 has additional benefits and drawbacks.
Pros:
- Skills aren't tied to any particular attribute.
- It retains the "RP it a specific way to get bonuses from your other stats" thing that EinBein and others wanted.
- Fixes the imbalance between stats and attributes.
- Technically also better-adjusts our current associated skill rules, so that a character with rank 1 in an associated skill isn't getting the same benefit as a character with rank 5.
Cons:
- In danger of "RP whoring for extra dice," but that's a natural side effect of the desired intention.
- Where in the first proposal, "dead levels" weren't a consideration after character creation, all skills and attributes now have a modifier attached to them and the dead levels issue is way more present. All of the core skills and attributes are going to look like Agility 5(1), Stealth 7(2).
- Sorta weird that attributes tie into combat now, but not directly into skills. Not a mechanical issue, so much as an odd asymmetry.
When we get down to it, there are only so many ways Skills and Attributes can interact.
Attribute and Skill Interactions wrote:1. Not at all. Attributes and skills are purchased and rolled separately and ne'er shall the two intermix. Mechanically fine, but might annoy some people. Also slightly inconsistent when attributes then play a part in combat pools.
2. One limits the other in some way, such as attributes determining the number of dice you can throw against a TN based on the skill (TROS), or attributes forming a cap on how many skill dice you can throw. Generally lame, as it means you're hampered by whichever is weaker instead of focusing on getting better at the one you're interested in.
3. Attributes contribute to the skill pool on a 1:1 basis. This is the simplest mathematically, but whenever this is true, you're going to make attributes more valuable than skills, mechanically.
4. You combine attributes and skills on a 1:1 basis, but make the pools asymmetrical in some fashion (such as skills being on a 1-10, attributes being on a 1-5). Retains the mathematical simplicity of 3, but now bloats the pool and creates two different ob scales.
5. Attributes contribute some portion of their value to skills through division which creates some version of dead levels and modifiers (in this regard, Proposal 1 is significantly less offensive).
6. You come up with some kind of multiplication setup instead of division, which has all of the drawbacks of 4 but without the mathematical simplicity.
7. You come up with some kind of chart to precisely fine-tune the relationship between each attribute and each skill when coming up with the final pool. Gets rid of the modifier effect and dead levels, but now you need to reference a chart for every roll. Not recommended.
Of all of the above, 1 and 5 are the least broken. 5 is where the current two proposals come from. Of the two, I think 1 is cleaner/faster/easier. We can retain the "Roleplay description" incentive, but it winds up with the dead level effect.
No matter what system we go with, you're going to have a drawback. The drawbacks I find least acceptable are ones that add mechanical clutter, or a fundamental imbalance.
If you play 40k, you certainly use those nice little white dice. Those are changing a lot in comparison with d10 in terms of rollability in high numbers. This in its own right will increase the logical limit of pool sizes.